


The Soldier Prince

by pushdragon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:22:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fairytale in which Merlin carves wooden models and tries not to make any more porn films.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Soldier Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the wonderful meredyth_13 who single-handedly lured me into the world of Merlin.
> 
> (This is old fic - I'm finally copying some old LJ stuff onto archives.)

Arthur didn't usually dwell too much on his family's place in those rich lists – mostly because only a business with more machismo than good sense would arrange its assets so as to edge into the top ten and attract the inevitable scrutiny of regulatory authorities. Most days he didn't care whether Pendragon Industries was at eleven in the UK, fourteen in the US, or twenty seven globally. Today, however, he wanted to know whether they were rich enough to buy LA. He wondered how long it would take to knock the whole place down, from the beach to the hills, and put something worthwhile in its place, like some wind farms, or a really large football field.

Pissing Cupid was three quarters of the way through the sort of anecdote that every man in this town had in his repertoire, about a blow job from a beautiful stranger in a nightclub, or a sauna, or a toilet in the first class lounge. Less than two years past his first big hit, Pissing Cupid had only known the upside of the spinning wheel of celebrity, and hadn't yet learned the old hands' habit of glossing these stories with nonchalance and self-deprecation. It was unlikely that the punchline would be about how he had coolly turned her down. 

If only Arthur had been able to negotiate mid-morning instead of lunch. It was an hour at least until he could leave Cameron to sort out the contract terms and make his escape, to stretch his legs on the streets, or make another attempt at that due diligence report, or get back to the hotel gym. Yet another side-dish arrived at their table, wedges of avocado fanned like a tropical flower with a thin stem of wasabi and knotted pickled ginger buds. Arthur found himself studying the pattern as the waitress put it down among the over-large square plates and tiered spiral bowls. Beside it, a streak of red chilli fronds ran through a plate of golden olive oil, making him think of the Chihuly above the entrance hall in his father's house. 

Pissing Cupid had a name, of course, but Arthur preferred the nickname he had invented, because Cupid was young, and fairly well focussed on his dick, and soaked in an easy, athletic beauty that had already given him a starring role in some of Arthur's weirdest and most embarrassing fantasies. 

"– and she said it made the margaritas taste less like laundry powder!"

Arthur managed to work up a chuckle to mark the end of Cupid's anecdote. 

"Mind you," Arthur said. "I'm not sure I'd trust the mouth of a woman who recognised the taste of laundry powder."

Pissing Cupid's agent laughed automatically. Cupid did not. He looked troubled, and the distress in his pretty eyes made Arthur's heart give an involuntary kick.

"She'd be dead if she did that. It's full of carcinogens and toxins. My laundry uses a detergent that's made a hundred percent from coconut." 

Cupid said all of this with the absolute authority typical of this town, where knowledge usually came from an elephantine memory for dubious titbits swapped in bars or in the breaks between interviews. Arthur's thoughts returned to the world's largest demolition job. 

"Only a hundred?" Arthur asked, but his grin went unreturned. 

Pissing Cupid frowned at his plate, poking at it with his fork. "What's with this meat? If I wanted soup I would've ordered it."

They had probably chosen this restaurant, Arthur realised, in deference to his supposedly adventurous European tastes. The truth was, he didn't need to be here at all. Cameron, the Director of Marketing who was topping up their shiraz, could have taken care of this. But Cupid was the figurehead they needed for the new civilian line of GPS, and at the top of the industry, where the paycheques were large enough that negotiation was only for play, personal contact was everything. 

Cupid had held out for Arthur's presence at this meeting. No doubt his interest had been stirred up by one of the (wholly fabricated) rumours about the lingerie model Arthur had entertained all over New York for the last month, or the (swiftly stifled) rumours about the footballer he'd taken back to his hotel for one regrettably indiscreet night in Dublin, the day after the Royal Navy deal had fallen through. In the privacy of the plane this morning, Arthur had speculated in idly creative detail on whether it might be the latter, but one glance had confirmed that Cupid was just another pussy-chaser. 

"No, what is with this?" In Cupid's growing indignation, Arthur caught a hint that he should have been more appreciative of the fellatio anecdote or perhaps shared one of his own. "Hey! Excuse me!"

Arthur's bouillabaisse was more than usually good, and the other meals looked equally competent. But the GPS was their beachhead into a civilian market that associated their US arm with trigger-happy mercenaries and contracting scandals, and to reverse that reputation they needed a young, pretty spokesman whose long-lashed eyes were already famous for conveying not only the horror but also the nobility of war. So he let Cupid make his complaint.

The waitress looked somewhere to the side of Cupid's stunning eyes as she listened. 

"It's a sauce allemande," she said with professional precision. "A basic velouté with saffron and pepper, and-"

"We can read the menu," Arthur cut in, playing the last-resort trump card of his crispest accent and best don't-fuck-with-me bearing, because behind Cupid's smile was a hint of impending foot-stamp, and he could not afford to waste this trip. "Can you tell us, without the sales pitch, is it meant to look like that?"

"Our recipes are individually crafted, sir. Only the chef-"

"Just the person we need to speak to. Thank you." 

He could see her weighing up how important they were, and how far they needed to be indulged. He held her gaze to convey that any attempts to divert him were doomed to swift disappointment. A few minutes of the chef's personal attention to plump up Cupid's ego, then Arthur would put in some pretty sustained flattery over coffee, take him out for the briefest possible man-to-man drink, and whisk him back to the hotel where Cameron wouldn't need to be told to have the contract waiting. 

"One moment, sir," she said, and left. 

**

Merlin's hands were bright pink from a long day's work and he resisted the temptation to hide them behind his back as he dried them on his apron and pushed open the galley door. 

He was being sent out here by way of punishment to deal with what Chef had laboured fifteen years for the right to delegate. Among the juniors, last one in got saddled with all the least pleasant tasks, and often as not that was Merlin. This morning he'd been later than ever. He'd been up almost until dawn carving the last touches to the boots of the soldier-prince and then, slightly hysterical with lack of sleep, he'd decided to keep going right through, and put on the first layer of paint straight away. Slipping in at forty five minutes past ten to a pretty sour welcome, he'd still had red coats and gold buckles in his head all morning.

He sized up table nine as a group of idlers. The food here was just a prop to whatever they'd met to discuss. They wouldn't fuss over the difference between whole truffles and supermarket field mushrooms, so long as it looked like a decade of training had gone into frying up a thimble full of them. 

Nonetheless, he would be polite to them, no matter what their complaint. It had been eighteen months since he had come here with his models and his paints and his head full of ideas, and he could feel the weight of failure gathering like an anchor around his ankles. He needed this job, so he could eat and do his work and look at himself in the mirror in the morning. Without this, he'd only have one place to turn, and he was not going back there. 

"How can I help, sir?" he was asking, when he found himself looking into a pair of exquisite hazel eyes he was used to seeing in blown-up proportions on the big screen and, to be frank, staring. 

"Fix this up." The hazel-eyed beauty had noticed the staring then, and was directing his disgust at his plate, flipping his dark hair over his scowl. Merlin, who rarely left the kitchens to come face to face with celebrity diners, felt something like a small-scale heartbreak. "It's slimy." 

Merlin only did side-dishes and starters, but the veal looked perfectly well done to his eye, apart from the fact that it had been eaten too slowly and the delicately blended sauce was starting to congeal. 

"Certainly, sir. What would you like?" Merlin was a bit distracted trying to recall the name – he'd seen the trailers for that Gulf War blockbuster all over the place. 

"What's so hard about it? I want it just like this, but not slimy."

He said it like it was a joke, but it was the sort of joke that could only be made to someone without the liberty to reply. Such a waste, Merlin thought, of what might have been the loveliest pair of eyes he had even looked into. 

"What sort of slime do you use?" 

Merlin had barely noticed the blond on the other side of the table; now he wondered what he'd done to deserve not one but two unhappy customers with looks to tie his tongue in knots. "What?"

"What sort of slime?" the blond repeated. "Is it local? Imported? Mass produced or hand-made at a little slime cottage in Tuscany. I hope to god it's organic."

And then he smiled and Merlin could tell that any trouble at the table, and any resolution to the complaint, was going to come from there. 

"Arthur's joking," said one of the others, so that the hazel-eyed stunner relaxed his gladiatorial hold on his fork. "You can't always tell."

Merlin's hands met behind his back and clenched, confused. The pretty waitresses probably resolved this kind of thing with a flutter of eyelashes and a teasing sort of glance. He was tired. He smelled of cooking oil and disinfectant, he probably had cornflour in his hair, and had never learned how to charm people.

The blond was still watching him. Merlin looked him in the – oh god, how was that shade of blue even possible? – eye and said, "Well it may be the latest thing at the Ivy, but I'm afraid we don't have any slime on the menu."

"I'll be writing to the manager about that. Listen, can you make a dry version? Put the sauce on the side if you like." 

This Arthur looked handsome and determined enough to have his own way in most things, and he had a way of putting a simple request that soothed Merlin's irritation and made him want to reach into himself and say yes, yes he could; to go beyond professional courtesy and deliver something that was a real test of himself. 

But the sauce was integral to disguising the fact that this morning's meat order had come in a bit short on veal, and for the last few serves the grill staff had been frantically making it up with the best of the beef. 

"The veal scaloppine, isn't it?" Merlin said. "We don't serve that as a dry dish, sir. The sauce is a velouté base with egg and -"

Arthur put his glass down with a clink against the cutlery, and gave Merlin a look that shut him up. 

Too late. Hazel-eyes asked with a threatening undertone, "Is there _cream_ in it?"

He lifted his glare from half-finished plate to Merlin, and Merlin was pleasantly surprised to find that this time his knees felt quite a bit firmer, and his mind was almost clear enough to give him the man's name. 

"Only a dash," Merlin said, an understatement that made him warm about the cheeks, particularly since enough diners came in on fat-controlled diets that the menu was quite explicit in that respect if anyone cared to read it. 

"If it's a high-temperature sauce, it will cook out with all the heat." 

Arthur had said it with such breezy authority that even Merlin, for a moment, believed him. There was a shrug in his voice as if everyone knew it. It was impossible to tell whether the hint of amusement lurking in the corners of his mouth was real or imaginary. 

"Like wine," Arthur went on. "A bit of wine in a dish cooks out in no time. Isn't that right?" 

"Yes, of course," Merlin replied, and put on his most trustworthy smile.

Arthur was still looking at him intently. Oh god. Merlin's knees went shaky again. 

He knew. He'd seen it. He must have.

Merlin had only done it once. The rent had gone up and there'd been a hint of interest from some producers in Tokyo that had turned out to be a waste of an expensive flight, and it had only been him on camera by himself, nothing kinky or hardcore that anyone would watch more than once, and god he'd seen enough of that kind of thing on the slow nights when inspiration eluded him to know that there was nothing especially memorable in the sight of Merlin Emrys getting himself off on a brown vinyl armchair. 

But this one had seen it, and remembered him. 

"I'll have it grilled for you," Merlin said, whipping the plate into his hand. The sauce sloshed onto the tablecloth. "And a bottle of something while you wait. The whole thing on the house, of course. I'm sorry. Really sorry."

He made it himself, when he got back to the kitchen. Prime steak with a diligent application of the mallet, rubbed with salt and pepper and thrown in a pan just like he did at home when he couldn't face another thrifty bowl of instant noodles, with some roasted mushrooms and a tomato salsa that was supposed to go with fish. 

There were no more complaints when Sarah took it out, and the tip was a bit more generous than usual, but that wasn't enough to remove the sense of dread that dogged him through the afternoon. 

**

It must have been the way the chef had said "sir" so uncomfortably, unlike the floor staff who rolled it casually off their tongues as if it had no more meaning than a comma, that appealed to Arthur. It could have been that. Or the very startled look he'd worn as he'd met Cupid's extraordinary eyes for the first time – the same reaction Arthur had done a much better job of hiding just a little earlier.

There was guilt there too. He thought an apology might be in order. The bottle that had been sent out to them was top shelf stuff, hardly in keeping with an error that had been a figment of Cupid's imagination. He must have come across fiercer than he'd intended, though he had thought he'd got that side of himself under control of late.

On the sidewalk, Cameron was swapping cards with the agent while Cupid, on a satisfied stomach and a half-hour of Arthur's very best buttering-up, smiled beatifically at the world in general and wrapped his neck in a leaf green scarf that made his eyes more dazzling still. Arthur was suddenly sick of the lot of them.

"Great to have you on board." He gave Cupid's soft hand an efficient shake. "Come to New York – I'm there most weekends until April. You'll like our women. They prefer cocktails you can set on fire." 

"Hey, I have to ask." Cupid lowered his voice somewhat and leaned in. "One brother to another. Did you-"

Arthur, well prepared for a last-minute ambush about the lingerie model, cut him off. 

"Exquisite," he said, and forced his eye into a wink. Then he put a hand to jacket pocket. "Oh damn. I've left my pen. Sentimental, better go back for it. Don't wait for me. I'll catch you at the hotel, Cameron." 

They didn't have a bar, so he drank two leisurely cups of coffee at a free table by the door and blithely forwarded all the trickiest emails in his inbox to Legal – or, in one impertinent case, to his father – while he found out the chef's name and waited for his shift to finish. 

**

They had lingered for forty minutes over the bottle of wine that was going to cost all of today's shift and most of tomorrow's too, and Merlin had got nervous enough to scorch his thumb like a first-day apprentice on the wrong end of a set of tongs and completely fuck up an expensive crab starter not once but twice. He thought of his soldier-prince drying on his table at home and gritted his way through it, until finally the last pans were stacked on the counter and he had time to put a couple of plasters over the tender burn. 

The throb in his hand made him bitter as he hung up his apron. Why had he ever thought of coming here? Los Angeles was the last level of hell. He'd thought that nowhere could be more conservative than home, but in every way that mattered to him, this place was. The only creativity he saw was the occasional slice of mango tossed into a salad. A potato mashed much the same way in Hollywood as it did in London, except that here you had to lie about the butter in it.

Disappointment didn't half cover it. Merlin was wretched with bitterness as he dodged past Grace's office to put off the discussion about the cost of that bottle. 

It was just the crowning bloody glory that he was a few feet short of the front door when he turned at a movement in his peripheral vision to see the blond man from earlier standing up. 

"Merlin," he said, smiling an aren't-you-lucky sort of smile as he held out his clean, broad hand. "I'm Arthur, and I'm dreadfully sorry about earlier."

He was tired enough to feel a little out of his body as reactions washed over him – hot, cold, hot again. He longed for something solid, like a knife or a block of wood under his hand, to give him a point of focus in the fog of panic. He should never have done it. The Tokyo trip had been a dead failure anyway. He had to get this over with, one way or another, whatever it took.

"What do you want?" He added automatically, "Sir."

"I should make it up to you. How about a drink?"

That entitled smile was back again. God, he knew. He knew, and he was going to use it, and Merlin's mother was going to be so disappointed by what he'd turned into. 

**

Until he saw Merlin's reaction, Arthur wasn't certain that he'd been thinking of anything more.

"It's broad daylight, for god's sake. Just a drink." 

It was a pleasant novelty, actually, the little thrill of knowing it would be the sort of drink where he'd be working for what happened afterwards. 

He wondered from the exhausted shudder whether Merlin had a history with alcohol that made this a bad idea. So he added, "Unless you can't."

"No, I can."

The chef wiped his hand over his eyes as if he could scrub off the fatigue. 

"What happened?" Arthur reached out when he noticed the tightly wound plasters on Merlin's thumb and stopped just short of the appallingly forward gesture of taking his hand. "Those are new. Here. There must be something that can help."

In his wallet was a stash of prescription pills for emergencies with jetlag, early morning meetings and the worst of his stress headaches. Merlin stared at them and shook his head. "It's nothing. Let's just get going." 

Outside, he watched Merlin draw a deep breath of the damp autumn air and let it out slowly. He looked different out here, slighter and more driven. Gone was the anonymous bulk of the white kitchen cap and the apron. The black jacket emphasised the matching colour of his hair, and seemed to highlight the nice, sharp angles of his jaw. Daylight etched his personality more clearly on his face – not only the marks of concern, but also the faded tracks of laughter around his eyes. 

"I suppose you're a writer then," Arthur said for somewhere to start.

It was pretty clear from the way Merlin stopped dead to look at him that this was completely and utterly wrong, and maybe even insulting.

"Well if you're an actor, you've gone the longest I've ever seen without trying to give me your portfolio." He knew his cheer had gone a bit brittle. He hadn't picked Merlin as the ego-driven sort and found himself disappointed to think that he was. "Which there isn't any point in doing. I only know a couple of directors, and they're no good to you unless you specialise in lesbian Victoriana, or zombies."

That got him a grudging smile. "Zombies would be more like it." But after that, Merlin went quiet again, head down as they walked, his fist in his pocket fidgeting unsettlingly. 

"So what is it? You didn't come all the way from home to make veal scaloppine for certified idiots, did you?"

They'd gone another dozen paces when Merlin tugged his fist free and handed over a scrap of carved wood. It was a crown, with tall gothic points, a little forbidding and lonely to Arthur's eye, but there was gold paint brushed thinly into the fine grain and it glinted as he turned it. The wood was warm from Merlin's palm and a little bit damp.

"Models," he said reluctantly, with none of the patter Arthur was used to in this town, where condensing your life's ambition down to a catchy one-liner was a core social skill. "I make models out of wood. Kind of fantasy stuff, movable joints. I might one day – they'd be good for animation." 

"I knew it," said Arthur, not minding the streak of self-congratulation. "Creative."

He held onto the crown for a bit, turning it around in his palm and looking at the little inconsistencies in form that gave it character. He wondered how it would look on one of the shelves in the sitting room in New York, though it would be the cheapest item in the room by a matter of a few zeros. 

Since Arthur didn't know anywhere more strategic, he led them into the first bar they passed, a dark place with a low ceiling and sticky table tops, almost empty. It was only once he'd slumped into a chair that Merlin lost a bit of his nervous haste. With his hands around a cold bottle, he came close to calm as Arthur drew him out with patient questions about his carving, and his shifts at the restaurant, and the twists and turns of his journey from home. 

But more and more, Arthur found himself filling in the lulls in conversation. This was awkward, since he knew from past experience that when he had the luxury of a date who didn't read the business pages or the gossip magazines often enough to know his face, it was better to keep them in the dark about who he was.

"Can't spend all day chained to the desk," he had just said, as if he might be talking about a moderately sized cubicle rather than a corner office with a view over the piers and a good deal of Brooklyn. "Lunch is good for a couple of laps of the park."

That seemed to pique Merlin's interest. "Aren't you – you know. In the business? I thought you were-"

"What? Vain and shallow with the mind of a butterfly? Don't pull any punches. I can take it."

"You look like you should be. That's all." He fidgeted with the crown in his pocket. "What do you do then?"

"Office job," Arthur shrugged. "Government contracting, you couldn't get less glamorous. Is that paint?"

Merlin's hands were spotless and raw, but the light outside had revealed the spattered smudge of gold in the shadow under his cheekbone. Merlin only turned his head slightly, and let Arthur make an indulgent attempt at removing it. It was nothing that should have made his pulse start to flutter. He thought he should at least find out whether Cameron had had any success with the contract. 

"Oh fuck – sorry."

Out of nowhere, Merlin had tipped over his bottle. Arthur had thought that beer would be the right note to start on, but it had seemed to stretch Merlin's fatigue thinner, so that his little restless quirks got more obvious, clumsier. Arthur brushed his hands away and mopped up the spilled beer with a wad of napkins.

In the stillness afterward, he felt the crack-of-dawn flight catching up with him. Merlin didn't seem very interested. But after the tiresome ordeal of Cupid, he'd had all he could take of being irresistible, and he didn't want anyone who couldn't see past that kind of sleaze. He let his jaw sink forward onto his fist. 

"Can I buy you another?"

Merlin glanced at the empty bottle. "No thanks."

He was hard to read. Arthur wondered whether he'd got too used to people who knew who he was and flattered him accordingly. It was all or nothing, then.

"I'd really like to see your models," he said softly, hardly even trying to be winning.

Merlin's hand retreated to his pocket again. He looked suspicious and defensive, but he hadn't said no. 

"The least I can do is take you home in a cab. Come on."

**

In the short flight of stairs up from the street, the sleepy lull of the taxi dissipated until Merlin's pulse was jittery. That awful video had slipped to the back of his mind, overshadowed by a deeper fear. This morning, as he'd set the soldier-prince on his desk, he'd burned with certainty, the vision of the story he could tell vivid in his mind. The gentle prince whose sword was the solace of his land. Who wielded it for the protection of the small as well as the great. Whose spine did not know how to bend. Behind him, his subjects fell into place: the grim-faced king, the princess with the ice heart, the kind serving girl, the wizard with the wild hair that obscured his eyes. 

Only now, turning the key in the lock, he felt he might have been fooling himself. Perhaps they were just wood and wire after all, and their beauty would be invisible to someone like Arthur. 

From Arthur's face, it was clear that what he saw first was the state of the flat. He sidled into the tiny standing space beside the generous table, as Merlin kicked spent underclothes and cola cans under the bed. Then Arthur saw them and slid straight into the office chair to turn on the lamp.

"They're not finished," Merlin said as Arthur gripped the wire leg of the princess and lifted her gently. 

He started pulling up the covers on his bed, refusing to watch judgment being passed on the only good thing he had done for more than a year. He tried to imagine them through Arthur's eyes. Long, mournful, gothic faces with delicate carved features. Cartoonishly tall bodies joined with wire at the neck and wrists and ankles. The princess had long hair plaited into a wreath behind her head. The carving had taken days, and he'd spent even longer mixing the right shades for her hair and mouth and eyes. 

He had less idea than ever what to make of Arthur. It was pretty clear his persuasive skills were as polished as Merlin's were rough. If he wanted to make something of that video, he'd had all too many chances to hint at it. There was no need to waste his time feigning interest in the carvings. 

"Oh, Merlin."

A little shiver went up Merlin's spine like the words had been a caress. He probably had some sort of special elocution lessons to master a tone of voice that made people long to please him. 

Arthur was leaning back in the chair, cradling the dragon in the palm of his hand, curling and uncurling its mobile tail like a familiar pet, looking perfectly at home.

"These are incredible." And if the words hadn't been enough to make Merlin a bit shaky, the smile that went with them would have done it. He sat down on his bed and tried to make it look like a casual act. "Really incredible. I've never seen anything like it."

Merlin had to pick at a loose thread on his jeans pocket, to hide the grin that had taken over his face. 

"Not that I'm surprised. I recognised it at lunch. The avocado was yours, wasn't it? You've got that touch. But these – these are so much more. They really are beautiful. Are they for sale?"

"I hadn't thought about it," Merlin said, but his face must have shown his devastation at the thought of parting with any of them. 

"No, of course not. I understand."

As he put the dragon down, tucked under its legs was what looked twice the value of that bottle of wine, and Merlin was pretty certain that a man like Arthur ought to have a good idea of what it was worth.

"Ah. Not subtle enough?" Arthur followed his gazed and shrugged. "I'd just as soon not argue. And now I know your address, I'd only find another way of making it up to you." 

"You already bought me a-"

"You deserve it. He really was an arse today. You came out looking like a saint."

And understanding came on in Merlin's mind like a flicked switch. He didn't know. After all that, he didn't know about the video. He was-

It was a good thing Merlin was already sitting down. When he thought back to the half-hour Arthur must have spent cooling his heels over coffee, and the mess Merlin had made of the beer, and how nervous and sullen he'd had been all through it, and the way Arthur had said _Oh, Merlin_ that he'd probably remember for months, the conclusion took his breath away. 

Fortunately, Arthur had turned back to the carvings and pulled the soldier-prince towards him.

"I did that one this morning," Merlin said in a rush. "I was up all night."

Arthur laughed, a big sound in the tiny bedsit. "Is that why you look like death? Christ, I'm so glad. I thought it was all that fucking scaloppine. I've got a couple of handy friends, you know. I can probably have all sorts of gruesome things done to him, if you'd like revenge." 

He had a way of saying these things, like he was kidding, unless you needed him not to be. Merlin picked at that ragged thread again and began treacherously to be jealous of his models.

"He hasn't got a face yet," Arthur said a bit later. He had picked up the soldier-prince, the only truly unfinished figure. The coat needed another layer before it attained the deep red of Merlin's vision, but the hair, where he'd run low on yellow and had to mix it with gold, had come out serendipitously perfect. His figure was as straight and firm as Merlin had intended, but he hadn't known how to manage the face with the kindness he imagined as well as the strength.

"No," Merlin said. "I didn't know what he looked like. When I did it."

Tomorrow, he would finish the blank face, now that he had it fixed in mind. And that would be the end of it. Even yesterday, it might have hurt him to think that. But Arthur's coming here had changed things. They were beautiful, his characters. They didn't belong here any more than he did. He was going to leave this shitty town behind. It would be a few weeks to save the fare, maybe half that depending on what the count of Arthur's money came to. He was on his way out of here, as of today.

He watched Arthur set the soldier-prince back down and fall quiet. 

"Should I go?" Arthur said. 

Merlin unwound his legs and shifted off the bed, moving quickly as if he could stop his second-thoughts catching up with him. He put his hand on Arthur's shoulder and slid it up to the base of his neck, inside the collar of his shirt. 

Arthur gave something between a laugh and a sigh, a more stressful sound than Merlin would have expected him to have in him. It made Merlin protective and tender, and he'd had more than enough time now to notice that while Arthur's beauty hadn't been the first to catch his eye, it was the sort that endured and deepened the more you looked at him, and didn't vanish when you happened to catch him from an unguarded angle. 

Arthur was already leaning into him, arching over the back of the chair. Merlin ran his hand up Arthur's throat, to steady his chin, then he bent into the awkward angle and kissed him. 

**

It had been years since Arthur had had the leisure time to steal weekends away with a boyfriend, and sex had become a fast and usually drunken tumble in the nether world of the dead of night. He'd forgotten how transporting it could be in the lull of afternoon, when his mind was at its quickest and all the boring end-of-day domestic sounds from outside made him feel connected and awake and intensely focused. 

There were two burned golden stripes on the opposite wall, the last gasp of the setting sun coming through the blind. Merlin had gone out like a light beside him, one hand curled into Arthur's ribs and the other loose on the pillow between them. He looked, Arthur thought, like one of his carvings, delicately made, with his character whittled into the grain of him. 

Arthur carefully got up, and dressed and checked his pockets. His phone chirped when he turned it on. Merlin jerked awake at the sound. 

"Oh."

"I have to go," Arthur heard himself say, as if he needed to give an excuse. "I'm flying out tonight. Sorry."

He didn't mention that by this late hour Cameron would be sitting in the hotel lobby sending apologetic messages to his wife back in New York and planning some suitably acid observations for the moment Arthur turned his phone back on. On second thoughts, Arthur turned it off again.

Merlin swung himself out of bed, drew on a t-shirt from under the desk, and filled a mug from the sink under the dribbling tap.

"Do you want some?"

"I'm all right, thank you."

"Okay."

Merlin eased past him to get to the door and opened it. Outside, the first streetlights were coming on, beginning the overblown glare of the city at night. When Arthur looked back, the sunlight had faded off the wall. Arthur put his hand on the stair rail and told himself to go down. 

"Why don't you take him?" Merlin was holding out the most handsome of the carvings, the soldier with the unfinished face. "I can make another one, now that I've got him in my head."

Arthur looked for calculation but couldn't see any. Merlin's arm was stiff, like he was forcing himself not to take it back.

It was obvious what Arthur should do. He should find a gracious way of saying that he couldn't take the model away from its creator. If he took it back with him, he knew would happen. He wouldn't be able to make himself discard it in the back of a cupboard like he should. He'd put it somewhere prominent, like the window sill of his office, and look at it whenever he turned around to gaze at the skyline and clear his head. And every time he saw it, he'd think of this cramped little flat and wonder what Merlin was doing in it. He'd remember the texture of the dragon's spine under his fingers. He'd think of the feel of Merlin's back under his palm, the tentative yielding of his mouth. One especially monotonous afternoon, he'd call Ruth or Marty and enquire hypothetically how much it cost to make an animated short film, or a feature, and who they knew at the studios. Then he'd give himself a day or two to enjoy the anticipation, before, on the verge of over-thinking it all and getting clouded with doubt, he'd make one of those last-thing-in-the-evening calls to Merlin, and arrange a weekend to fly down. He'd be a short-tempered horror in the office until the moment of take-off, and if everything went well he'd come back breezy and revitalised and transparently happy. 

If all this took more than a fortnight to happen, he'd be amazed. 

Merlin's arm was faltering.

"I'd like that very much," Arthur said. 

He took his phone half out of his pocket and put it back, because the way Merlin lit up as he held the soldier out again made Arthur wanted to kiss him, and that was a step in the wrong direction when he had already made this much too complicated. 

"Have you got a picture of him?" Arthur asked. "I'll send you one. Give me your number."

Merlin fetched a fine point marker, flipped the soldier up, and wrote on the unpainted soles of his feet in neat numbers so small that Arthur was going to have to hold it under bright sunlight to read it. His grip held the carving perfectly still as he worked. 

Arthur was susceptible to well practised skill the way other men went for pert bottoms or tight shirts or a particular shade of blonde. On impulse, he got a card out of his pocket and slid it onto the desk, so that he could be gone by the time Merlin read the full name.

"Call me," he said, not in the way he was used to handing out instructions. "If you're in New York. Even if you're not."

"Okay." Merlin leaned against the door and made no move toward closing it. "Take care of him."

He looked worried. "I think I can take care of something made of wood. Even if I have killed a small army of pot-plants in my time."

"That's not comforting," Merlin said, but said it fondly, so that Arthur finally felt reassured about leaving. 

"Come and check up on him if you don't trust me," he said, meaning it a bit too keenly. Then with one last glance he turned down the stairs, tucking the soldier into the crook of his elbow.

**

The card was simple, the sort of simple that said a great deal of very expensive work had gone into getting the proportions just right. The name on it made Merlin drop it.

But back on the bed, the name receded into abstraction. The sheets were still warm and mussed up from their bodies. The condom wrapper rustled under him as he lay down, remembering Arthur's weight moving over him, resting on him, the strength of his beautiful, big hands as they roamed and coaxed. Little things came back to him, like the smell of Arthur's body when he'd stripped his shirt off, like the way even his mouth had been strong, like the cracked sort of quality his voice had got as he'd started to lose it. 

He put the bright light on overhead and fished a new block of wood out from the scrap box under the table. His fingers seemed to move of their own accord, as though carving from memory rather than conscious thought. It was a challenge to take a physical phenomenon like Arthur and capture the essence of him in wood, but Merlin was going to do it.

Not long afterward, he was asleep at his table, knife in one hand, the carving clutched in the other. The face was unfinished, but already the likeness was unmistakable.

**

Arthur put the window down and tried to get his head clear as they inched their way through the traffic. Once the rush to the airport was done and they were in the air, he was going to have a hard time explaining to Cameron where it had come from. And he was going to have an even harder time explaining it all to his father if the deal with Cupid had gone sour. 

But there was no room in him for regret. He leant his head back and let himself run through a few pleasant fantasies about other times he might come here, wondering whether it was too soon to see if he could get Merlin up to his flat in New York, and whether a few slow mornings in Arthur's extremely accommodating bed could ease that shadow of worry out of him. 

He turned his phone back on, but only so he could do what he'd promised and take some photographs of the soldier. When he saw it on the screen, there was something weirdly familiar about the set of the head and shoulders, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He supposed it was just an artist's knack for capturing something universal in their work. 

It was a bit keen to be sending emails before he'd got more than a couple of miles from Merlin's front door, but a measure of recklessness had served him pretty well all day, and he knew what he wanted.

**


End file.
